Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Over the years this blog has shifted focus away from life stuff and toward...well, mostly books and poems. But occasionally a life thing is big and needs saying.

My dog died yesterday.

She would have been 16 in April. She had probably 14.5 years of being quite healthy and energetic, a year or so of having some arthritis and being a little more fragile, and then the last half year she was clearly an elderly dog. We couldn't let her go up and down the stairs any more--she sometimes fell, and it was only a matter of time until one of the falls hurt her if we'd let them continue. So we were blocking off the top or bottom of the stairs, depending, and carrying her up and down. A friend made her raised bowls to help with her arthritis, and we were feeding her soft food. We were doing all we could for her, and in the last few months I started thinking, maybe we should get old dogs from now on, we're really good at care for them.

I don't think that now. Because the care for them is not all there is, there's also losing them, and I don't think I could bear going through this over and over again without the springy young dog stages in between.

She was so smart. She was such a smart dog, and she was so communicative. And she was so loving. Toward the end, basically the only thing she wanted was to cuddle, and we did that a lot. We did that a lot.

I don't know how my days will be without this sweet little opinionated old lady dog. I have so much more to say about her. I wish I had so much more time with her.

(This is the eulogy that a family friend, Barry Anderson, read on my behalf at Dad's memorial service yesterday. It is by no means my final word on my father, but rather a beginning of the writing I will do about Dad and what he's meant to me--and one for a very broad audience, since we had at his memorial various sides of the family, my friends, Mom's friends, Grandma's friends, my colleagues, his colleagues--and of course his friends from all different parts of his life. Still. This is where I started.)

I think most people go through at
least some phase in their life when their dad is not one of their favorite
people--some time, usually in their teens, when they kind of get at each other.
I never did. My dad has always been at the top of my list.

When I started studying physics, I
found out about binary star systems, where two stars form a stable orbit around
a center point instead of one consuming the other's mass. I thought, that's Mom
and Dad. Then I learned that the planets in those systems tend to have very
eccentric orbits, and I thought...well, there's me. There's always been more to
our family than that--but so much of my childhood took place in that binary
star system that as I try to write this, I'm having to translate from a private
language with only two native speakers left. Some of the small communications
among us were not even conscious. The day after Dad died, when I was missing
the way that I would go off with Dad to just be silent together for a moment,
Stella told me that we each made the mirror image of the same face at each
other when we wanted to have that silence together. I never knew that, I just
did it. It was like breathing. Right now I am trying to write this with half
the light on my planet gone. When Mother was talking about how overwhelming it
was to try to write a eulogy for Dad, I said to her, Mom, we can walk on the
surface of the Earth, we can send people to walk on the surface of the Moon,
but we can't send people to walk on the surface of the Sun. Her relationship
with Dad was two suns, and you can capture flashes of that, the lens flare of
shared jokes, the warmth it cast on everything else, but you can't portray it
directly. It was just too bright.

Tolstoy said that happy families are all alike but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Being raised by my parents made it clear that that Tolstoy was completely wrong. I'm willing to believe that we are not the only happy family! But I'm pretty sure the other happy families didn't spend nearly as much time talking about prehistoric giant beavers, Earl Battey, the Oglala Aquifer, the politics of mountain regions vs. prairie regions, or Haakon the Seventh as we have. I think it's hard to explain how much variety of stuff I have always talked to my dad about. It's pretty normal that I talk to Dad about how Mom is doing or how to best encourage the godkids in their dreams--although I know not everybody has a relationship with their dad where they get to do that. It's less typical that I've been excited to talk to Dad about dinosaur poetry or a new book about algae that's coming out this summer, but that's how we roll. I have no idea how I will prepare for the talk I'm giving next month about existentialism in the works of children's author Lloyd Alexander, without talking to Dad about it. For so many topics he was the only person in the world I could think of to talk to. Part of this is that Dad was always, always willing to go off on the weirdest tangents. No road was too obscure or too strange for my dad's attention. There's a story about my uncle Phil that ends in "Nah--too weird!" but one thing he got from Uncle Phil and passed on to the rest of us is that nothing was ever, ever too weird to talk to Dad about. Nothing too personal, nothing too unimportant, nothing too philosophical, nothing too off-the-wall...it could all go to Dad.

My dad approached parenting like he
approached everything else: in a spirit of joyful exploration. My mom tells me
that when she was pregnant, he would bend down and whisper to me in her belly,
"Chemistry is fun. Math is easy." The fun part there was not
optional. The message was not "put your head down and do science at all
costs, no matter how terrible it is," it was "let's poke at the
universe together and see what fun we can have." It was "don't let
them tell you this is a grind, because it's actually a great big game."
After lab in college, I would call Dad to talk about how each experiment went.
I still remember the surprise and excitement in his voice my junior year when
we got to Franck-Hertz experiment, one he had never performed, and I got to
describe the lavender mercury vapor and the peaks and valleys that showed the
quantum world in a way he'd never seen. Dad loved to bounce his new membrane
ideas around with me. We got excited about the world's beautiful new
possibilities together.

We explored maps together from the
very beginning. When I was almost six, we packed up the five of us in Grandpa's
big blue Buick and set off east. Dad handed me the maps one morning and said,
"Let's try to get Grandpa into the middle of downtown Toronto." For
the first time, I got to help navigate--and I steered Grandpa right into the
heart of Canada Day celebrations, because Dad believed I could do it. He never
believed anything was beyond me. Coming out of one of the hardest years of my
life, I wrote in his Father's Day card, "Your support has always meant the
world to me, Daddy, but in the last few months it's given me the strength to
pursue my dreams. Thank you." He kept it. Mom found it in his pajama
drawer along with the postcards I'd written him every week of that year, which
was the year I started publishing fiction. He taught me not just how to use a
map but how to go off the edges and make my own.

I have wonderful stories of exploring the world with my family, tasting fish on the wharf in Bergen, Norway, trusting Mom's nose to pick out the best pub in London, or dodging traffic trying to get to the North Church in Boston, but truthfully some of my favorite explorations with Dad were to such exotic locales as--silence please--the grocery store--or--drum roll--Target. Every trip to the park resulted in a magic stick. Saturday morning trips to the post office were a special treat I looked forward to all week. I think one of the things that made time with my dad so wonderful is that he was such a great listener as well as a good talker. He and Mom wanted to learn things with me, not just teach things to me. Lots of people's musical taste stops in their early twenties. Dad did want to expose me to the artists he loved, so I got plenty of Simon and Garfunkel, Beach Boys, Carole King, and more--but he was thrilled to learn about 10,000 Maniacs, Barenaked Ladies, and the Indigo Girls in the Nineties, up to Josh Ritter and Meg Hutchinson in this decade. He never stopped having new music to love. Lillian was so proud to play Santana songs for him, but I know he would have loved learning whatever songs she and Rob grew to love, because he had never stopped and had to restart again.

This is not to say that there
weren't a few hilarious bumps in the road of joyfully exploring with Dad. When
I was five, Mom worked an early shift to be able to be home with me when
kindergarten got out at noon--which meant that Dad was in charge of getting me
ready for school in the morning. He was still cleaning up breakfast dishes when
I slipped in the bathroom and singed my wrist on the curling iron. Once he made
sure it was a superficial burn, Dad did all the right things, running my wrist
under cool water and bandaging it, pulling me into a hug--and then said,
excited, "Marissa! Now is a great time to learn about your body!"
What! I listened indignantly as he described the miracles of the white blood
cells mustering a defense of my skin, which did not seem like an opportunity at
that exact moment. I teased him about that one for the rest of his life,
drawling out, "Daaaaad, it's a great time to learn about your
baaaaaady."

My dad's belief in the importance of playfulness ranged through his whole life. His relationship with Grandma started with water fights when he was a teenager and she was a fun young mom throwing her home open to hordes of her daughter's friends. Up until his last days, Dad loved to play cards and games with Grandma and her friends--and how many mothers-in-law can honestly say not only that their son-in-law would drive their friends around for game night but that he clearly enjoyed doing it. He would also peer carefully at the intricate games Mark, Mike, and Kev would set up at Christmas, at all the tiny moving parts showing new kinds of game that he had never seen before, always a fascination.

But he took especially thoughtful care in teaching play to my friends when I was little. A lot of dads coach softball--so did mine. But I also have pretty special memories of how my dad taught one of my friends about teasing and joking. She was an immigrant whose journey to this country was pretty rough--and once she got here, her experience of Americans teasing was that she was the butt of the joke, and that laughter was always at her expense. My dad took the time to teach her in very gentle stages that it didn't always have to be that way. I remember him coming in and saying to her, "You will be very sad because Mrs. Lingen has made brownies and you do not like those." He waited hopefully. She paused and thought about it. "Mr. Lingen, I think you are teasing me because you know I do like brownies." He said, "Yes--and you know you can have as many brownies as you like here at our house." From that very simple point Dad stepped her up to the idea that you could tease somebody because you liked them--that her new American life could feature people who were including her in the joke instead of keeping her out. That was the kind of play he always liked best, and he wanted to make sure other people had the chance to enjoy it too.

With all the time they spent together from basically the minute their ages hit the double digits, you'd think my parents would know everything about each other. And yet I remember within the last year each of them marveling to each other, "I'd never heard that story," or, "I didn't know that!" about new discoveries they could make together, new stories to tell each other, new dreams of ways the world can get better. Some of this is that they remained always open to listening and thinking about each other's perspective. Some of it is that they have both always listened respectfully to others, so that when they came home to each other they would have fresh perspectives to present from their conversations, new thoughts sparked by other people they value--people from all walks of life.

My dad centered values in his life, not policy--the question was always how to get clean water, clean air, how to feed hungry children, how to nurture hungry minds. When he was a young man he was interested in hearing my grandfather's viewpoint, which was a lot more traditionally conservative than Dad's was then. These days I'm pretty far on the progressive side, and Dad listened to that with just as much respect as he gave Grandpa. But the point for Dad was never what team you had signed up to play for it, was how the ideas worked and whether you were treating all humans with respect and decency--and whether you were always willing to take in new information on how each idea was working in the world to help real humans. My dad would be the first to tell you that if you spoke all the tongues of men and angels but had not love--real love, love that is enacted on the earth--you were a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. (Probably less than that, because he would want our percussionist Lillian to have all the clanging cymbals she wants. Sorry, Stella.) 

My dad taught me that a perfect day was a day that we all spent together as a family. The details didn't matter--it was the time we spent that made it perfect. So if I tried a new recipe and the sauce came out soupy--perfect day. If the beautiful castle and garden in Uppsala were at the top of a very VERY steep hill--perfect day. (As God is my witness, Grandma, it looked flat as a pancake on the map.) He appreciated the ways that Mom and I spent time lining up details to make a GOOD day, whether it was reading newspapers over brunch, climbing down a thousand-year-old copper mine, learning a Japanese style of weaving, or spending all day making the year's supply of lefse and Christmas cookies. But ANY of the details were the RIGHT details as long as we were together, and Dad knew that was what mattered. He would hug me at the end of the day and whisper, "It was a perfect day."

We had so many perfect days.

This is in response to a locked post a friend made about how hard it can be to talk about things when you’re doing badly, without minimizing or feeling like you’re whining. I wrote most of the post and then realized that people might think I was being subtle about myself instead of reacting to a friend. But: locked post, cannot link. Sorry.

Some years ago, a friend of mine lost her partner (also a friend of mine). In addition to his death–as if that wouldn’t have been enough–my friend also lost her voice for quite some time, and there was an incident with a falling piano, and…yeah. It was not a good scene for my friend. Everyone who knew her knew of the string of bad things, but those of us in town had more opportunity to actually spend time with her.

Then I went to World Fantasy, and I ran into some people I know by name but do not know well. They were friends with my friend. And when I mentioned her name, they immediately said, “Oh yes, how is [friend]?” And I said, very firmly, “She’s doing just great.” They reared back and stared at me as though I had grown a second head. Doing great?, they asked incredulously. I, in turn, stared at them as though they had grown additional heads and said, “I don’t know how much better anyone could expect her to do under the circumstances!” Well, no, they agreed. Under the circumstances. Really one could not. But we sort of looked at each other funny for the rest of the conversation.

And it is hard to find the balance between informing people of bad stuff that’s going on and feeling like you’re whining. It really is. But this is also complicated by the fact that friends and other people of goodwill can’t rely on coming from the same cultural perspective on this. Even when one is speaking on behalf of someone else and not worrying about whining–and Lord knows if anyone had earned a whine that fall it would have been my friend–what message is conveyed by what level of response is highly, highly culturally determined. I would have felt disloyal if I’d said something that, in retrospect, was more like they seemed to expect, more along the lines of, “Poor dear, with all she’s been through it’s a wonder she can put one foot in front of the other to get from bed to bathroom.” It was a wonder. But she was doing it, and I didn’t want to give the impression that she was not. They already knew the practical details–I knew this was not a situation where I was going to be called upon to say, “Oh, had you not heard the terrible news?”

And I think one of the major cultural obstacles to overcome in achieving actual communication is how much people are expected to state the emotionally obvious. Sometimes it’s a relief to turn to someone and say, “I’m really sad right now,” or, “This has been very stressful for me.” But sometimes it’s also a great relief not to have to. Sometimes it’s a very great relief for the person or people you’re with to think, “Hmm, gee, Friend’s partner died, maybe Friend is REALLY SAD, I’ll do something nice,” without having to spell out every moment: “Still sad. Yep, still devastated. Life still in chaos due to very sad thing, yep yep.”

Sometimes you have to do that. Sometimes that’s just how it works out. But wow, is it another layer of difficult just when people don’t need more difficult. And it’s a thing to keep an eye out for a) when writing people from different cultures and b) in trying to be compassionate in, y’know, real life.

We have all sorts of things going on, tasks and chores and ideas, attempts at healing and social things, worries and relief. And threaded over and under and around and through it is the fact that we are coming up on the fifth anniversary of my grandpa’s death. Like his mother before him, he died on March 16, cementing the next day’s St. Patrick’s Day associations for me pretty permanently. Maybe there’ll come a time when I don’t think of it, but I kind of doubt that. On the day he died, I was so glad and so grateful to have a loved one cooking corned beef and cabbage for us because it was hot food made with love, but now the association is so strong I hope I never eat it again.

I brought all his books home and cataloged them and stacked them up, and I have been reading through them. Some of them I bounce off, some I read through, and you see them in my book post. There were hundreds. Now there are less than twenty. When I realized the five-year anniversary was coming, I was grateful that there were not fewer, because I will soon be done reading Grandpa’s books, and if there had been two or three, if there had been only a handful, it might have felt like the right thing to try to finish on the anniversary, and I think that would have been wrong. I think that would have been too much synchronicity to bear, and yet it would have been hard to resist that kind of narrative pull. So I will just keep at it steadily, and I will finish reading them when I finish reading them. The universe is full of ragged ends and things that don’t come out evenly, and that is better than okay, it is good. The tidy packages, the tied-up strings, they are not how life works.

When I have finished reading my grandpa’s books that he owned, I will be okay. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I will cry. I will probably cry like my heart is breaking all over again, because it will be one more thing, one more piece of loss. But I can never lose my grandpa all the way. I knew that the day he died, and I was right; I know it just as much now. Every year for his birthday I buy myself a book for Grandpa and me. And it’s a good tradition, but that thing I said up there about things coming out evenly, I meant it, so if I’m somewhere in an odd little bookshop and I find a book for Grandpa and it’s not coming up on February 1, I buy it for Grandpa and me anyway. Or I get it from the library for Grandpa and me. Of course it’s not the same. It’s not remotely the same, that’s the horrible part. But I can only do the part I can do, and this is the part I can do, the stories, the remembrance, my side of the conversation.

And putting more of the protag’s grandpa in the book I’m revising. Because he belongs there, and because.

I never met the man, but you can spot him at whatever age. Whether you’re watching the Weavers videos from 1951 or the concerts before the first Obama inauguration in January of 2009, Pete led with his grin. You can see immediately that it’s the same guy because he’s lifting his chin and grinning in the same way. With so many 94-year-olds, you’d say, well, he had a good run, or, I guess he was about done, it was time for a rest. But with Pete, no; with Pete there was still so much to do. There was always so much to do.

Because Pete Seeger was one of those people who appeared to honestly and truly believe in improving the world. All the way through. He was blacklisted and shut out for so many years after the HUAC testimony, and he kept on singing about making the world a better place, and he kept on making the world a better place. I’m a Gen Xer, the young end of Gen X; grunge and cynicism are my coming-of-age music. Also I am not a fan of the banjo. But in college I discovered Pete Seeger, and I just couldn’t resist. Fell in love with the Peteness right away. And when you hear him in person, as we did in 2011, when you hear him sing “We Shall Overcome”–not only do you believe for a minute that we shall, but for a minute you can even believe in we. Even if you’re a congenitally grumpy Xer. Because Pete.

Just last week, Timprov and I were driving home with four new tires and zero new photos (…long story), and I asked what he wanted on the CD player. And he said, “I don’t care…wait, have we got More Together Again?” And we did, so we put it in: Pete with his grandson Tao and Arlo Guthrie and other musicians they know and like. And we sang along all the way home, “Midnight Special” and “Abiyoyo” and “Guantanamera” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “This Land Is Your Land,” all of it, all of it, through the dark night home with Pete.

Edited to add: I realized the obvious thing to link. Here, have Precious Friend.